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Well that was fun! It was really exciting to share with the world what our team has been working on in designing and developing over the past few years with regard to Windows UI platform advancements. Build 2017 was a culmination of a lot of efforts across the company in various areas, but for UI it was the introduction of our evolution of design, the Fluent Design System. This represents a wave of UI innovations over time, with Build 2017 showing the first views of Wave 1. There was a lot of great buzz about Fluent, but for a great...

Silverlight 5 is finally released! Congratulations to the team for getting through some of the toughest parts of finishing a product and validating with customers. It’s been a pretty crazy year for the Silverlight team and this is a really good release for the product bringing some solid features to the platform for folks to leverage in building their apps. In addition to the platform having a release, I was really pleased to see an update to the Silverlight Toolkit, which has been one of the most popular things almost every Silverlight developer/application uses. If you didn’t know where...

Today there was an event in San Francisco which introduced the Windows Store for Windows apps as well as some details on revenue sharing and policies. As a part of that Antoine LeBland, Vice President for Windows Web Services, also opened up a new dialog about the store specifically in a new blog Windows Store for developers. This blog will help developers learn about aspects of the store as well as serve as a place for dialog between the store teams and you, the app developer. I think it is great that the store team is following in the footsteps...

In case you haven’t paid attention today, Microsoft announced the upcoming developer conference in September: Registration is now open so get registered…and save $500 now. For a preview of what is coming in Windows, be sure to check out all the details at the company release “Previewing ‘Windows 8’” which includes a video walk through of some of the features. Then go register for BUILD! tags: windows, win8, build, pdcThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

At the MIX11 conference Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Silverlight 5 Beta. I suppose this doesn’t come at a surprise to most as this is now a regular annual occurrence. In fact it is almost exactly a year ago when Silverlight 4 was released.
The team has been working very hard to deliver on the features we discussed at the Silverlight Firestarter event last December 2010. That was a flurry of revealing that happened in December showing the world what the Silverlight team has been working on. There was no rest for them of course and they continued to complete...

Today (at approximately 10:00 AM PST) our team released an update to the Silverlight 4 runtime. This update, dubbed internally as “GDR3,” provides an update in the following key areas (KB2495644):
Timestamp issues with media playback and VC-1 codec
Visual Studio IDE crash when profiling a Silverlight application which has a pixel shader
Enabling Silverlight to run as a 32-bit process in 64-bit Firefox on OSX
DRM fixes for a “6207” error when playing protected content after upgrading to a version of Silverlight
Memory leak...

Last week or so the PivotViewer control was released, which is from the Microsoft LiveLabs team. It’s a Silverlight control that enables you to visualize data information in a DeepZoom type experience. Be sure to check out the PivotViewer learning section for some initial information if you haven’t seen any demonstrations. I received an email a few days back hoping for a more quick “how to” on using this control. After all, it is a control for Silverlight and requires some implementation. Honestly, I hadn’t even used it myself until I got that note. I thought I’d jot down...

I just got back from speaking/attending the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, Norway. It was a great time and a well run conference. Like many other conferences I found myself looking for two things I wanted on my mobile: the schedule and a map/guide for the city (I’ve never been to Oslo). You see every time I take a trip, here’s what I do: Search for an app that contains the schedule (or offline version). Ideally allows me to build my schedule and gets updates for changes Find the metro/map/guide for the city...

A few days ago, I saw someone posted on Twitter a question about running WordPress on Windows Server. Since I had done this for a few sites, I responded with my thoughts and tips. Another suggested that I post those here, and so here I go. WordPress is a blogging/content-management platform that has been around for a while. It has been gaining more in popularity for general purpose content sites over the past year I’d say, but is primarily seen as a blogging platform by most. Even though I use Subtext for my platform, I have to admit that...

Today’s the day! Tuesday at DevConnections in Las Vegas, Scott Guthrie just announced the ‘launch’ of Silverlight 4. We wanted to take the opportunity at DevConnections to let a large audience of our customers online/offline know that we’re done and shipped Silverlight 4. As of today it’s now available for you to download/use. Here’s some helpful quick update information for you: Download the bits Understanding what is in the bits RIA Services Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools VS2008 and VS2010...

Next week on 13-April at 8:00 AM PST Scott Guthrie will deliver a keynote address for the DevConnections conference being held in Las Vegas, NV. Scott will provide updates on the progress made in Silverlight 4 and will provide the details of availability of the developer tools, runtime and other news. Mark your calendars and return to the Silverlight community site to tune into the LIVE event. After the keynote, Channel 9 will be hosting interviews with Scott and other key members of the Silverlight and Expression teams. I’ll be hosting one of those interviews as well...

One of the features we are introducing in Silverlight 4 is a ‘silent install’ mechanism for out-of-browser applications. Currently every out-of-browser application (trusted or not) starts from an in-browser mechanism. In some instances where you want to deploy the app via managed desktop software or perhaps via CD-ROM, you don’t want to have to tell the user to start on an HTML page first.
Now I’m not going to write here about the merits of why you might want to do this other than to point out what I believe to be the 2 prominent scenarios: managed desktop deployment and CD/DVD...

Well, MIX10 is over. It was a great time to meet a lot of people and see friends from afar. As anyone knows, the networking is a HUGE part of being in-person at any conference…that vibe, value and friendship cannot be matched online.
But the sessions – there were a TON of them. It is quite impossible to be in 3 places at one time. Thankfully the MIX team record all regular sessions and make them available for viewing online or offline. For you Silverlight developers here are my picks to ensure you watch:
EX55: Building the eBay...

If you installed the Silverlight Client for Facebook, and also upgraded to the release candidate for Silverlight 4, you may have noticed it stopped working :-). NOTE: Applications compiled on Silverlight 4 beta will not work on machines with Silverlight RC runtime. This is known/expected. As with all pre-release software, this type of breaking can be expected. We’ve recently updated the Facebook application, and you will have to re-install. Follow these steps: Uninstall the Silverlight Facebook client. You can do this in a few ways. First on Windows through the Add/Remove Programs or by...

One of the announcements that happened during the MIX10 conference was the availability of the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API. This is the engine that powers the translation behind http://www.bing.com/translate and some other Bing-related properties as well. A lot of research has gone into the engine from Microsoft Research and others. Language translation isn’t an easy task especially taking into consideration cultural significance of words, etc. I have heard that the most challenging in machine translation is to Asian languages. I will admit to not speaking any of them, so I don’t know how well we are performing here...

So the news is out!
Silverlight IS the platform for Windows Phone 7 Series development!
Sweet. We also made available an update to Silverlight 4 that you might be interested in too!
You may be wondering how you get started. If you are new to Silverlight, I recommend getting familiar with Silverlight first. You can find all the tools you will need at the Silverlight community site. In addition to the core tools you’ll want to get the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. This will add to your Visual Studio 2010 installation (or install Visual Studio Express) to enable Windows Phone...

UPDATE: Silverlight 4 is RELEASED! READ HERE!
At MIX10, Silverlight 4 released an update, the Silverlight 4 RC (release candidate). A few things have changed since the beta which was released in November. If you haven’t read my guide to Silverlight 4 you may want to check that out. The features still exist, but there are some changes to the implementations of some of the features as well as some new ones. Please go read the previous post to familiarize yourself with the features. This post will be complimentary to that and identify new/changed.
First let’s get you going with the tools:
...

‘Twas the week before MIX, when all through the tubes
Not a developer was sleeping, not even the noobs.
The laptops were paved removed of their glitz
In hopes that they soon will get some new bits.
A developer was coding, building an app
Trying to build the next greatest XAP
Battleship gray?! Now that’s obscene
Check our designers’ latest theme
Okay, so I’m not going to win any poetry awards. Our UX design team for Silverlight has been thinking about app building a lot this past year,...

I’ve received a few emails about updated code for the Scott Guthrie MIX09 keynote demo referred to as “bouncing plane” Silverlight demo. A screenshot of this demo is seen here to refresh your memory:
There really isn’t anything ‘new’ about this demo code for SL3, other than being recompiled. Perhaps the only real change is to accommodate the new requirement that pixel shaders are resources of the project. You’ll see the Effect1.cs code file where the constructor code for the shaders uses:
1: pixelShader = new PixelShader();
2: pixelShader.UriSource = new Uri("/BouncingPlane;component/ShaderBytecode/Ripple.fx.ps", UriKind.Relative);
If you are writing shaders,...

Today, we posted on the .NET RIA Services forum an updated roadmap for the timing and thoughts around the product offering. What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the...

Last week I was wanting to do something on my site sort of a ‘breaking news’ style banner that would span the entire site width but only when I wanted it too – based on a cookie or something else. And I didn’t want to do something server side, because I was sick of doing stuff like that. Not having played with jQuery, I thought I’d take a dive. Prior to MIX09, I’d been testing something that the MIXOnline team had been toying with, which has just been released: Glimmer. Glimmer is described as a jQuery Interactive Design Tool. ...

One of the great things about the Silverlight team is that usually in the home stretch most of the feature samples of numerous ‘hello world’ type examples start shaping into creative ideas to demonstrate various features. One such example is a full Silverlight 3 application that Mike Harsh created to actually demonstrate various features and it is what he used to present his session talk as well. He currently calls it Slidentity and it demonstrates: Various skinned control usage Perspective 3D (when you view the slide show) Open/Save...

I understand that there was some folks at MIX09 who weren’t happy (or maybe ‘were bored’ is the better term here) about the day 2 keynote session with Deborah Adler, a designer from New York who created the ClearRx system for medical prescriptions. Yes, it was not your typical Microsoft keynote presentation and in fact, followed by IE8 announcements, had nothing to do with releases, Silverlight or anything like it. Sort of. Robby said it was the best MIX keynote ever, and if I wasn’t a geek, I’d agree (I mean, c’mon, I’m a ScottGu fanboy too). I’m guessing...

PLEASE READ UPDATE: While the API for checking for updates has changed, the update model *after* that method call to CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync is the same as described below. See this note for updates since this article to the Out-of-browser experiences.
Wednesday at MIX09 was a great day. I was exhausted, but after the keynote I was so high on excitement it was great. Throughout the day Twitter was buzzing (or is it fizzing?) about all the news around Silverlight 3. In one conversation around the out-of-browser experiences with Silverlight, I caught a conversation on Twitter about it with questions about the update...

Well, by now the interwebs are getting busy with the news about Silverlight 3 details announced at MIX09. The team has been hard at work (and still aren’t resting) pushing out this beta release. Over the next week you’ll see lots of blog posts by team members and Silverlight MVPs who have been enthusiastically waiting to share what we’ve been working on and show you some sample applications they’ve been working on. Quite frankly, so will I :-).
But in the meantime, allow me to share my thoughts and perhaps some deeper details with you if you can’t discern them in...

I’m sure you’ve heard of the IIS7 Smooth Streaming information and perhaps even experienced it if you watched some of the NBC Olympics streams last year or the Presidential Inauguration this past January. It’s a great experience for online media being able to seamlessly deliver quality media online without constant buffering when latency occurs in networks you don’t control, such as your customers’ ISP accounts. You may have wanted to try out this experience yourself to see exactly what it does and how it works…as well as to simulate bad/good bandwidth. Well, you can. Here’s what you do: ...

I was just thinking the other day that I have some decent subscriber numbers here, but the same volume isn’t matched on my Twitter account. For those who don’t know about Twitter, it’s a great short message service that kind of works like a global messaging system. The best description I’ve heard has been: Twitter is like an ongoing conversation at a party. Come in and listen/participate whenever you want with whomever you want. Leave at your leisure. Come back often if you’d like. I use Twitter to communicate along with friends, family and...

Okay, about a month ago I was shown this demonstration by my new favorite friend Ward Bell of IdeaBlade. Why is he my new favorite friend? Well besides being a great guy, wait till you see what he has to show you. I briefly alluded to my excitement via Twitter as a teaser. I previously mentioned that we saw some sneak peeks of Silverlight 3 added features for line-of-business application development with Brad Abrams. Today, check out what Ward has to show you: I am...

Want some sneak peeks at Silverlight enhancements for line-of-business applications? Check out the video with Robert Hess and Brad Abrams where Brad shows some some sneak preview of some feature enhancements. If you want to download the episode above, visit the Channel 9 page here. Be sure to stay tuned for MIX09 for more announcements and updates! tags: silverlight, lob, xaml, wpf, navigation, deep link, deep linkingThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

The other day I was given a peek at a company who implemented a full-frame Silverlight application that when I saw it it was one of those “wow” moments. A lot of the public-facing Silverlight examples are very different from one another and sometimes you see some that are full Silverlight applications that really give you a glimpse of how people are thinking about using the platform and how creative you can get. Colaab is one such example that I saw at PDC last year (check it out if you haven’t). Another example is a recent one called SnapFlow. ...

I’ve written a few times about some of the controls that have been provided by organizations like Telerik and ComponentOne. I figured it would be a good idea to do a larger dump of those that I’m aware of (and hope you add comments to point me to others so I can amend this list) and help make you aware of them as well. There are a ton of great resources out there for Silverlight developers and I’m always impressed how our developer partners are extending our platforms to make tools for developers (and most of the time better than...

A company called divelements has had Windows Forms products for a while that produced, among other things, the “docking” effect that you see with some applications, including Visual Studio. This is the ability to drag a window to another area and have it automatically dock to that particular position of the parent window: This product is also available for WPF and for Silverlight. So if you need to add this type of dynamic window moving to your applications, you can check out the SandDock for Silverlight controls. What is great is that in looking at what else...

I have to admit, when the first MIX was happening it confused me. Yet another conference? In my usual pessimistic self I tried to convince people that it was wrong, blah, blah. But I was wrong. MIX has become of of my favorite conferences to attend. Not only for the announcements that likely happen, but for the networking with industry folks in an area I’m most passionate about.
Enough gushing though. I’m going to MIX09. Will you be there? If you register before 13 Feb 2009, you’ll be able to get $400 off the registration fees! Register on the MIX09...

The Encoder team has updated their Silverlight Streaming (SLS) plugin for Expression Encoder 2. On the surface pretty much nothing has changed, but it essentially updates the ability to use the plugin to publish Silverlight 2 templates to SLS automatically without getting the random error that you’ve probably seen if you tried. Since the new Silverlight 2 player templates are completely parameter-driven, which is awesome, it did present a small challenge for the plugin. When you use the new plugin with a Silverlight 2 player template, you’ll notice that the resulting application uses a bootstrapping method to launch with...

One of the great things I like about some of our platform products is that they are building in extensibility more and more. Take Windows Live Writer as an example. It’s no secret on this blog that I’ve got a geek affair with that tool. I use it daily and have customized it (via plugins) and my blogging platform (Subtext) to make it even more of a best experience for me for web authoring. Writing plugins for Writer has been a lot of fun and a great way to get the functionality I want/need into a workflow without having...

One of my favorite implementations is to leverage the initParams feature for the Silverlight plug-in. This enables you to send parameters to your application prior to it starting up. These parameters are in plain text and can be seen in the HTML source of your page, so obviously you wouldn’t want to include any sensitive information there like passwords, connection strings, etc., etc. But it can be very helpful for re-using application logic while providing an configurable experience. You can view a video demonstration of this and other methods of using initialization parameters on the Silverlight Community site here: Using...

In an email dialog today I saw someone asking how he could use an existing Encoder 2 template for existing media or streaming URIs when you don’t have something to encode. After a few explanations, he replied that someone should blog this – and I agree :-). So what did he mean? Well, when you use Expression Encoder, you are typically going to be encoding media to a format to consume. Encoder also gives you an additional option in the output settings to generate a media player for that encoded content. These are all based on templates that I’ve...

The source code for the Silverlight 2 controls was just published! This is the source for the controls as shipped in the runtime and the SDK. When you download the project you’ll see the structure: The source, released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), includes the source for the following controls in the runtime: ButtonBase Button HyperlinkButton CheckBox RadioButton ToggleButton ...

If you haven’t been aware, there has been a team at Novell working hard to make a version of Silverlight for Linux. This version, called Moonlight, has been in development since WPF/e it was first shown at the MIX conference (which by the way is happening in March with some really exciting stuff, so be sure to register for MIX09!). Moonlight hit beta this past December 2008 and the team has already been working on Moonlight 2 which is the Silverlight 2 compatible version. Right now, Moonlight 1.0 serves as a functional equivalent to the Silverlight 1.0 runtime, which...

Sharing Knowledge. That was the theme of the Øredev conference held this past week in Malmö, Sweden. I was invited this year to participate in this conference in the Scandanavian area to speak on Silverlight technologies. I am very humbled to have been invited. This was truly a great conference and let me tell you my impressions. I’ve attended Microsoft’s PDC, TechEd, VSLive, DevConnections, etc. I’ve got most of them all under my belt (as an attendee). They are all good in their own regard. The ones that are most interesting, however, are those that have an intensity about...

Whew, we made it! Silverlight 2 is now released (and available for download)! (Official press release here.) I know we’ve always said “by the end of the year” but the team has worked really hard to get Silverlight 2 released well before then so you can start building and deploying your applications. A lot of people don’t realize that “Silverlight” is actually a team of many that make up the runtime, media, tools, controls, etc. teams. Hats off to all those involved who pushed hard to get Silverlight 2 out the door (and are already working on the next version)!...

Saw some posts today over at Don’s site about Surface. The Surface SDK is starting to get more visible whereas before it seemed a little black-boxish to me. Turns out (as we all knew) it really is just WPF with some unique Surface-like behaviors in the SDK. Take this quick demonstration from a program manager on the SDK. With using the same concepts that we use in WPF and Silverlight for data binding, etc. you can come up with a quick application using the inherent gesture support from a Surface device: Pretty cool huh? Same XAML concepts...

I first saw the accelerators (the artists formerly known as activities) during The Code Trip, when Woody created an IE8 activity for Wikipedia. It was a convenient tool to have in your right-click toolbox on IE and I loved it (and still do). Well, now that IE8 Beta 2 is out, I decided (well, my selfishness decided) that I should create an activity accelerator for something that I use often so I introduce you to: IE8 Accelerator for TinyURL. So with a little XML, it was done. Seriously, like < 5 minutes. I ran into one problem...

Had enough media players, games, and animated shapes with Silverlight? How about integrating into some line of business applications? Microsoft produces an application called Microsoft CRM, now in it’s 4th release (those closer to the CRM information can correct me if I’m wrong…I’m actually not too familiar with the roadmap/releases of CRM). What is CRM? What you’d expect, a customer relationship management system…define your use of those systems as you wish. There are many CRM systems out there, but what struck me as interesting about MS CRM is based on a demonstration I saw about a year ago when v4...

How does 2000+ machines sound? Transforming a Saturday Night Live recording area into a live commentator section full of workstations and bloggers? Scoble had a chance to sit down with Eric Schmidt from Microsoft to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes information about the NBCOlympics.com Silverlight experience. Despite the video quality not being great, the information is very good. I recently saw a few other partners involved in the NBCOlympics.com project talk about things and kept feeling like they were really missing a great opportunity to talk about one of the key aspects in the implementation. Eric covers the basics...

Well, I wish I was going to this event: ReMIX UK! For one, it would be starting the day of my birthday and would be a great birthday treat! Secondly, I would be able to meet up with my fellow escamoles chaps and maybe take in some local cuisine instead. If you are in the UK, or for some reason really wanted to see the current value of the US dollar, make sure you head to ReMIX UK! The lineup is pretty incredible when you look at it…here’s some Microsoft favorites: ...

Have you seen those television commercials about used car markets and someone standing in a white background and as they vocalize their automobile preferences the selections fly in and around them. That’s what I was reminded of when I came upon the new feature on Kelley Blue Book’s comparison feature on their site. I had previously written about some innovative uses of DeepZoom with Jose’s samples and I like what KBB has done here as well. They’ve leveraged Silverlight with DeepZoom in a way that provides some good user functionality but at the same time provides a line-of-business application...

I’ve seen the rumbling a few times now about property setting in Silverlight. The rumblings are along the lines of “why do I have to use SetValue for setting simple properties like the x/y positioning?” To those points, I agree from a fundamental standpoint. From a technical standpoint SetValue is there and serves a great purpose for providing a common way of setting properties on XAML elements regardless of the element. As a developer, I like it actually. I do, however, see the point about wanting to set simple properties and it just looks a little verbose. Take for instance...

One of probably the coolest casual ‘games’ I’ve ever seen is Line Rider. It’s a fun game, but really gets exciting when you have an artist behind it. Basically it’s a blank canvas for you to draw a route for the main character to hop on his sled and ride. Sound lame? Not when you see what some have come up with. For example, here’s a very popular ‘ride’ on YouTube.
Well, the Line Rider team has recently modified their beta version and implemented in Silverlight 2! They’ve also added some social networking integration using Live Messenger and the ability to...

Over the past few months Joel and I have been back-and-forthing modifications to his original great idea and goal “build a re-sizable video player using no custom user controls, but instead leveraging controls styles and templates.” Joel started in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and implemented using the style method (aka ‘the MIX model’) available at that time.
I took it and added some functionality of scaling and startup parameters. After the VisualStateManager model for styling was released, this project made perfect sense to demonstrate those abilities and thus I transformed the great styling work that Joel did into the VSM...

Well, I have about 3 hours until I leave this little city called Mexico City. Sarcasm of course, did you know there are roughly 25 million people in Mexico City. I didn’t. It is amazing. Traffic, however, is something to be desired. I’m told that a 3 mile trip at times could take 1hr, 30 minutes. Maybe I should stop complaining about my commute when I do it? No, it still sucks. Anyway, on to business. Yesterday I attended and spoke at the MIX Essentials Mexico conference. These events are happening worldwide and if there is one coming up...

Um. Whoa.
Okay, DevExpress rocks. I think this will be very well received by the community and you’ll have to watch their page for when it is available and to get your license.
From their site:
As the release of Silverlight draws near, DevExpress has invested the engineering resources needed to deliver a feature-rich grid control for Silverlight. Not just a "preview" of what is possible with Silverlight, the AgDataGrid Suite was developed to fully exploit the power and flexibility of the platform…
It looks like it will support pretty much everything you’d expect in a DataGrid and more…wicked cool. Congratulations and thank you...

This has been one of the features that I’ve been excited about for a while since I heard we were changing it. With the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the updated preview of Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008), skinning and styling controls within Silverlight gets a bunch easier. When Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released there was the possibility of styling/skinning controls. It wasn’t impossible, but perhaps a bit obfuscated to the eye for people with short attention spans like myself. You can read more about those methods here and here. WPF designers were...

This week I’ll be traveling to Mexico City to meet developers and designers at the local MIX Essentials (English translation here – funny that RIA gets translated to LAUGHS) event. I’ll be presenting two sessions there this week. I was fortunate enough to be asked to kick-off the conference talking about building RIAs with Silverlight 2. I’m particularly excited about this as I have some things to show that haven’t really been shown broadly yet. I will also be speaking on working with data in Silverlight 2 later in the day. This session will cover working with services, servers,...

I just finished up a day attending the Chicago RIApalooza event in, well, Chicago. First, I must say that I love cities with great mass transit systems. I’ve said this before and I keep threatening myself to move to one. For this event I paired up with a super designer Corrina Barber. Corrina works as a user experience designer at Microsoft, is wicked smart and was a perfect compliment to this event. Most of the attendees at RIApalooza I believed to be interactive developers, so most having a knack for design. I figured rather than a developer...

Take a few minutes and look at this video of Jose Fajardo re-demonstrating one of his ReMIX features shown using Silverlight and DeepZoom. Are you kidding me?! Seriously, Jose has a great imagination and an incredible sense for effectively demonstrating things. In this video he answers questions posed to himself like “what if all web images were DeepZoom-able?” and “what if all the documents on the web were DeepZoom-able?” Then he gets crazy and suggests that people could collaborate with a DeepZoom image and demonstrates this using a Silverlight chat experience built using network sockets. I love his context...

I’m very excited to have the opportunity to attend the RIApalooza event in Chicago in a few weeks (31 MAY). What is RIApalooza? RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and "PowerPoint-Free" zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built. source: riapalooza.com I love the PPT-free zone aspect of it. I loving having the maximum time to show some real working code, answer questions and see what...

There are some really great application concepts emerging using Silverlight. I cam across two that I feel are really demonstrating great use of the technology, both in the code as well as attention to detail in the user interface. Both of these examples make great use of layouts, controls, etc. within Silverlight 2 to show what is possible with some imagination and the platform. The first is the “My Travel Management” site which leverages real travel information to represent the scenario of looking at flight arrangements. It definitely is a twist on the Silverlight Airlines, providing a little more...

I know ScottGu already did a good sample showing integration with Digg and Silverlight, but check out what Jose did!
Jose does a great job explaining each of the components here and what he is doing to develop this application. A good experience demonstration with a lot going on there with Silverlight. I really encourage you to check out this read and subscribe to Jose’s feed – he’s what I’d call ‘wicked good.’
tags: silverlight, jose fajardo, cynergy, digg, wpf, xaml, ria

In my previous post about cross-domain policy files I received some comments about whether or not cross-domain access is allowed on Silverlight Streaming. I think really this is two questions that I'll try to clarify here.
What is Silverlight Streaming?
For those who don't know, Microsoft provides anyone with an account to "stream" Silverlight applications for free. We'll give you 10GB of space to put your Silverlight applications. There are some limitations, which you can read about in the service. The "streaming" name has confused some. It isn't only a "where can I put media files" location, but is a service to...

Je viens en Belgique pour MIX!
In one of my previous posts I made reference to the MIX Essentials event happening in Belgium later this month (24 APR). Well, it turns out that I will be there! I'll be speaking on Silverlight 2 and creating rich applications and am joining the company of Gil Cleeren and Catherine Heller...oh yeah and Ballmer (I tried to catch a ride with him, but couldn't cash in my frequent flyer miles). My session will provide an overview of everything new in Silverlight 2 and how you can start building your applications using it...

I've been with Microsoft now for over 3 years and have loved every minute of my time here. For the time leading up to being hired at Microsoft, it was a professional goal of mine to work for the company. Fanboy? Sure, call me whatever you want. I prefer to just call it passion. I joined as a developer evangelist for my community (an area we call desert mountain which spans Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana). This was an easy thing to say yes to because everything I learned I learned from being a part of...

If you are doing Silverlight development, you are no doubt slapping in the <object> tag or using the <asp:silverlight> control (if in ASP.NET) to host your Silverlight content/application. This is all great, but don't forget about deployment!
When I talk about Silverlight I like to relay a story I heard from one of the Silverlight program managers (PM) a while back. The PM was pretty excited about a feature just completed in Silverlight and one of the samples that had been created. He went home to show his wife and told her to 'go to 'dub-dub-dub-dot-something-dot-com' (yelling from the other room...

The MountainWest RubyConf 2008 is upon us just 2 weeks away in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to be there given my travel with The Code Trip. IronRuby, however, was able to be a sponsor of this year's conference as a Gold Sponsor. This sponsorship is one part that enables video production of the conference for afterwards as well as a few other things. The organizers have done a great job getting great sponsors to make this happen, and IronRuby is grateful to be a part of that.
One thing that was recently released was...

Our current route on The Code Trip takes us to Boulder, Colorado on March 18 to the Boulder .NET User Group! I'm really excited about this stop in Boulder, CO as we've managed to get some help from great partners to demonstrate some very cool developer stuff they are working on.
Specifically, Quark and me.dium will be there to talk to the group. Quark will be showing us some stuff they've been working on for WPF and Silverlight. me.dium is a company that I met at MIX08 last week that were showing off some great stuff they've done with Internet Explorer...

UPDATE: Source code posted here.
Now that Silverlight 2 is out to the masses (even in beta form), there are likely a lot of developers looking to wire-up web services with their applications in .NET rather than the Silverlight 1.0 method of Javascript. I thought I'd give you some quick examples of how to do this using some different methods: ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), REST service, and talk about cross-domain calls. These are meant to be examples using very much 'hello world' style services, but demonstrating at least how to execute the call.
If you are an ASP.NET...

I just saw two links that I simply have to promote as they are very helpful to people doing Silverlight development and one specifically with ASP.NET.
The first is a site on silverlight.net (you should bookmark this site as a resource and subscribe to all the feeds), there is now a Silverlight 2 Beta 1 control sample page, which hosts all the new Silverlight controls on the site. It shows some different usage of all the controls:
Very cool to see all the controls implemented in one section, play around with them and see different styles in some as well.
The second link...

The group that brought you one of the first Silverlight end-to-end games (Zero Gravity) is now featured for some of the work they've done with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 for Miniclip.com, the largest online gaming site in the world.
You can view the Terralever case study online here. The Terralever crew is interviewed in four different segments talking about the project from a designer, developer, business and technical perspective.
The team built two casual games for Miniclip.com on both versions of Silverlight. The first, a Silverlight 1.0 game called 'Zombomatic 3000' has been on Miniclip's site for a few weeks now. ...

Wow, it's been a few months now since I thought about doing a road trip talking about the next wave of technologies. I originally thought it would be the "Silvertour" but we've now actually made it happen. I can tell you that the behind the scenes of this has been a long process. It seems so simple and I can hear the people now saying 'why was it so hard, c'mon you are Microsoft and have zillions of dollars.' Sure, maybe that is true about a big company, but that's also the point. We are a company of companies and...

I've gotten a few requests from internal local sales teams, Sharepoint professionals and developers about how to implement Silverlight in Sharepoint. I usually try to explain that since Sharepoint is essentially an ASP.NET application it is relatively simple to implement. Of course, that usually doesn't help :-). What helps is some documentation and samples that show how you would use Silverlight to enhance a Sharepoint experience.
As a part of the Software+Services Blueprints series, a new bundle has been made available to download to provide guidance and source code to help provide some information. In the blueprint you'll get:
...

Along with some of my compadres, Josh Holmes and Peter Laudati, we're helping our MIX team member Drew Robbins organize the Open Space @ MIX area. What is it? Well, sort of whatever you want it to be. If you've never been to an Open Space event format before there are some things you should know...
Four principles of Open Space:
Whoever comes are the right people to be there
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
...

From the 'does the guy ever sleep' category, ScottGu enlightens us all again with a very great tutorial on using Expression Blend 2.5 (March preview coming soon) to work with Silverlight 2 content.
Scott walks through a tutorial on using the design-time features of Expression Blend 2.5 and some tips along the way to produce a chat-like application using Silverlight:
Definitely worth a look to study before MIX. Someone might want to pull Scott aside about the font choice though...
tags: silverlight, mix, mix08, scottgu, expression, expression blend, silverlight 2, comic sans